Two-thirds of the country wanted the Senate to approve the gun background checks amendment, which failed to get 60 votes last week. From Gallup:

This poll shows two things. First, the insane rules of the Senate continue to undermine democracy. Only in America can something with 65 percent support and the votes of 55 percent of a legislative chamber fail simply because the rules theoretically allow “debate” to stay open forever.

Second, it shows why the gun lobby ultimately won. They successfully managed to make this vote on background checks about something more than just background checks.

This same poll asked people if they would vote for a ballot initiative that would require background checks on all gun sales and 83 percent said they would support that. Despite 83 percent supporting the contents of the Manchin-Toomey amendment only 65 percent wanted it to pass. The gun lobby effectively lied about what was in the amendment and/or convinced a large number of people it would somehow start a unstoppable slippery slope to much stronger gun control.

As a result, the poll found only 45 percent of Republicans wanted to see the amendment pass, while 50 percent wanted it to fail. There was apparently enough opposition in the base to make almost all Republicans in the Senate vote against it.

16 Responses
to “Why the Gun Lobby Defeated Background Checks”

The gun owners and industry resist every attempt to enact sensible regulation. They are afraid of everything because this is what they see has been done in the abortion debate, the death of a thousand cuts.

The right did it to us and they fear the same tactic will be used against them. They know what their ultimate goal is. They don’t think we will stop at a reasonable compromise, because they wouldn’t.

It is really too bad that there was no legislation introduced that would have only expanded background checks to cover purchases. The Schumer bill would have required checks for loans of firearms to friends and extended family members, payments to third parties, record keeping requirements, and multiple checks on the same person for multiple firearms.

Under the Schumer bill, a loan to your mother-in-law in the spring and returned a month later would require two background checks and payment to a third party for each of the two transfers. To repeat the process in the fall would require two more checks and payments to third parties. It is pretty hard to frame that as “reasonable restriction.” Scarce government resources may be better spent than checking the background of the same person many times over.

Ok… just throwing this out there. While I support the background checks, in my heart of hearts I think its “look busy” type legislation that will do next to nothing.

For me unless certain weapon types are banned, ammunition sales restricted and magazine sizes regulated not much will change.

Also as a city mouse, my main fear are handguns. Thats what most of us will encounter in our lives. Any bozo can get a handgun. All it takes is a bad day or happy pills changing someones brain chemistry or maybe a few too many roids at the gym for something unremarkable to turn into a shooting incident. If someone walks into a Starbucks with an assualt rifle you can pretty much duck and cover grom the get go. But anyone could be packing a handgun they can whip out at the slightest provocation.

The Senate was not intended to represent the people of the United States equally.

Cities with large populations (of non gun owners) could easily skew the poll results to “65%”. But in the Senate, Wyoming = CA, Kansas = NY, etc., until all the big population hubs are canceled out, and there’s more fly-over states than urbanized states.

Why on Earth does the Administration keep throwing itself against the Senate’s 60 vote brick wall instead of just attaching proposals to a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill? Just reframe the proposal as a revenue measure.

Pay Moynihan had the right idea when he was Senate Finance Committee chair 20 years ago– he proposed a 10,000% excise tax on hollow point bullets (sales to govt agencies exempted). You could put a 10,000% excise on all gun sales and then give a tax exemption to seller if he did an instant background check. Likewise Congress could levy a stiff excise on magazines larger than 10 rounds or assault weapons or whatever else they want less of. Why would anyone fight for 60 votes (and come up a few short) when they could instead fight for 50 votes (and have a few to spare)?

The Senate was intended to operate on majority vote however. The constitution is clear when it states the votes required for super majority (and ending debate/passing legislation is NOT one listed) AND it’s pretty clear the constitution intended a simple majority was all that was required for everything else when it gave the power to break ties with the Vice President.

Non listed super majority requirements takes a power away from the Vice President the Constitution gave him.

For the record, what the gun lobby convinced pro-gun voters of is that the Amendment was a slippery slope to creating a national registry of (legal) gun owners. Ultimately, time might be on the side of this becoming a prevailing view.

They were able to do this effectively within the pro-gun activist core in no small part because many advocates of tougher legislation were explicitly arguing that anyone against such a database was a paranoid right-wing militant hording weapons to use against the federal government (or to kill decent liberals and children). The other main line of argument by advocates pressing for the strongest outcome was typically that without such a central database the policy would be dang near useless.

In other words, it was pretty easy to point to the words of people who have vocally been advocating for background checks to assert that the policy’s ultimate intent was to create a centralized database – and using a couple of “clean” moderates to avoid it being associated with the political taint of those who legitimately hold strong positions. Neither Toomey nor Manchin are credible defenders of the 2nd Amendment when it comes right down to it … they were selected because of their perceived lack of baggage on the issue with the wider electorate and gooey center of bipartisan goodness (expect a similar tactic when they come down to cutting Social Security).

I’m one who is not in favor of warehousing the background check requests, and all and all I personally thought the amendment was decent. But I totally understand how they sold folks who share my concerns on not supporting the legislation. It’s a minor quibble, but an important one, IMO.

The filibuster didn’t kill the background check. Refusal to play hardball with the Republicans, combined with lackluster support from Obama, killed it. Harry reid is allegedly rhe Senate Majority Leader, isn’t he? Why can’t he simply refuse to bring up Republican bills for a vote, which if I understand his powers he can do, until they play ball? Why can’t Obama use the veto pen to back up his people in the Senate?

The system of checks and balances was designed to prevent abuses of power. Because some who have the power this affords refuse to use it doesn’t mean that the system itself is bad. I say get rid of Harry Reid and Barry Obomber.

I think this blog should be titled “How the Gun Lobby….” Why did the NRA do it? Because it wants violent ex-convicts and the mentally ill to have easy access to guns. The NRA doesn’t want its clients to lose one penny of sales revenue no matter how many people are murdered.

That seems a fair assessment in general. The question is, why would Obama specifically set things up to see this issue remain lingering as a focal point of political discussion? What does the administration have to gain by maintaining a context in which to wrap himself in a blatantly “progressive” cause? The most progressivest liberal ev-ar.

Hate to seem paranoid, but my take is that they are keeping the issue “hot” as an attempt at inoculation (or at least buffer) from leftern challenge when it comes time to get Obama’s grand bargain done. Of course he’s progressive – GUN CONTROL – so clearly he’s just being pragmatic trying to work with the GOP on “entitlements” … not like the “professional left” and ideologues who’d wreck the Democrats if allowed to steer the ship.

We’ve seen this unfold more than once now. A similar dynamic seemed to be behind why he didn’t just use his CIC powers to resolve DADT (or at least accept the court ruling which should have ended it) – the issue was more useful for the administration’s objectives left unresolved. There are only so many things Obama is able to do which don’t actually impact any of his paymasters to claim a “progressive” label – he can’t just go burning through his cover by getting shit done.

They successfully managed to make this vote on background checks about something more than just background checks.

But it wasn’t just about background checks. Granted, the arbitrary and pointless proposed bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazine clips” were pulled but it was very clear the attempt would be made to reintroduce them as amendments. I will tell you though, that’s not the only other reason you lost.

First, the vast majority of the people working on this push for “common sense firearm laws” had almost no idea what they were talking about and continually got caught out in public saying the most ludicrous shit possible. Now let me be clear here; I’m not expecting them to be experts. I’m not expecting them to always get every single bit of nomenclature or technical data correct. But I’m also expecting them to not sound like Todd Akin claiming that a woman’s body has ways to shut down conception during a rape. Meaning they shouldn’t sound like they’re either complete blithering idiots, like they’re just making shit up, or both. When you have Dianne Feinstein talking about bullets that “implode”, Diana DeGette saying that once you fire all the rounds in a magazine it can’t ever be refilled and any of the other assorted nonsense that’s been blabbered about since this all started, anyone with a level of knowledge about firearms greater than that which can be obtained by playing videogames or watching action movies is going to come to one of two conclusions. They’re either going to see the speaker as an idiot, or they’re going to see the speaker as assuming everyone else is an idiot.

Second problem has been the emotionalism involved. And honestly, this is the one that has made it so you deserved to lose. Just about every single pro-gun-control article has been focused on making anyone who doesn’t agree to the proposals to look at best, stupid and at worst, a pack of psychotic inbred illiterate racist homophobic thugs who gargle the blood of kindergarteners and kick puppies. There’s the small dick jokes, which I love because they’re simultaneously homophobia-light (the implication that the target is “not a REAL man”) and extremely sexist (because it effectively erases every single woman who owns firearms, or alternately suggests that they too are “compensating”). There’s the constant screaming of “THE CHILDREN! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!”, because honest debate is not about facts or logic but about implying that your opponent would gleefully scramble over a mountain of dead toddlers to purchase a new rifle. There’s the “jokes” about drone strikes, SWAT teams and Waco. Even better, there’s the more than occasional implication or outright hoping that anyone opposing this legislation loses a family member or friend to homicidal violence.

Now since you’re probably wondering why this means you deserved to lose this one so I’ll spell it out for you: because every single bit of this is directly from the same vile bag of tricks you (rightly) criticize the Right for using.

You’ve tried to take peoples’ friends and family and paint your monstrous caricatures over them, just like the Right does with LGBT folks and non-white folks. You’ve used the same kind of sexist bullying that the Right does against people who don’t agree with them, implying that they’re either not “man enough” or that they’re trying to BE men. You’ve slapped people in the face with the bodies of the innocent dead to try and shame them into agreeing with you, just like the Right did with the Patriot Act and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You’ve also tried to shame them as not caring about the safety of children, just like the Right has done every time they seek to remove our privacy and restrict our speech on the internet. And you’ve laughed and laughed about “natural selection” when someone’s killed by a negligent discharge and then laughed some more about sending the feds after those nasty gun owners, sounding just as gleeful as the people who laughed over Rachael Corrie’s murder and who laugh when “those Occupy hippies” get their heads bashed in by the cops.

These acts, these words, they do not suddenly change from being underhanded and vicious to noble and righteous because of who uses them or why. They’re also not going to start miraculously working even though they’re a greater and greater point of failure for the Right.

Of course the funny part is, nobody using these tactics seems capable of realizing any of what’s wrong with it. Oh no, they’re planning to double down on it, because now owning firearms is the same thing as smoking cigarettes! Never mind how people who continue to smoke invariably die from it while no such correlation exists for people who continue to own firearms and how there’s no safe way to smoke around other people at all while there are millions who safely own firearms around other people. No, this needs to be done because somebody somewhere got the idea that if shaming firearms owners and manufacturers didn’t work the first time, obviously the solution is more shame. Fuck facts because dead children. Hell, I’m almost 100% certain that at least one person is going to respond to me with the exact same crap I’ve been talking about, because the impulse to attack, to insult and to denigrate seems to override all sense on this issue.

And for you “gun owners for reasonable gun control”, I only have this to say: sure, you don’t own anything anyone wants to ban right now. Wait until the next Charles Whitman, Derrik Bird or Seung Hui-Cho kills a dozen people with a bolt-action rifle like your hunting gun, a double-barrel shotgun like the one you bought for busting clays or a .22 pistol like your target gun. Before you throw us “unreasonable” gun owners to the wolves, you might want to take a moment to consider who’ll be left to fill the menu next time.

Anybody wants to talk reasonable, I’m all for it. Let’s talk mandatory safe storage laws, mandatory safety training, access to the background check system for private sellers. Even better, let’s talk government subsidies for all of that so that firearms ownership isn’t restricted to the wealthy and the well-off so it’ll really stick in the Right’s craw. Let’s talk about separating the culture of toxic masculinity from firearms ownership. Let’s talk about disproportionate policing and the failed policies of the War on Drugs. But if all you’ve got is shaming and dick jokes? I’m just going to laugh at you for being a predictable tool who’s more interested in winning on the internet than saving lives and preventing injuries.

The filibuster had nothing to do with the failure of the background check bill. What killed it was massive lobbying pressure from the NRA and the timidity of Harry Reid, who really should be using his position as majority leader to play hardball. He could simply refuse to bring any and all Republican bills up for a vote until they start allowing votes on bills supported by Democrats. He could make them physically show up to the floor of the Senate to launch an actual filibuster. He could ask Obama to get his back by using the veto pen and the bully pulpit. None of this was done.

It’s the usual theatrics by Senate Democrats who want legislation like this to fail but are too cowardly to state their opposition. So they let the Republicans do whatever, refuse to filibuster bad legislation like the NDAA and DOMA (they have no problem letting those pass), and the GOP takes the blame for “obstruction.”